Seonid

Once upon a time I worked 4-8 AM. Getting up was no fun (interestingly, though, I actually far preferred that shift to my current one - 3:30 PM to midnight - because I got to have the evenings to myself, which tends to be my most productive time)

Congrats! See - nothing to worry about.

A true author is someone who can take worldbuilding and make it into a real story (unlike me...so far)

"Why you Duregar loving son of a Drow! Who threw that! What's your name!" From the table in the corner where the purse had come from rose a tall young man, no more than twenty. His hair was dark, almost black, and his face was fine-boned. He might have been handsome, if it weren't for an ugly red scar across his left cheek and nosebone, obviously only barely healed. "I am Avar Leduinne, my fine, drunk friend, and I say what I please, and to whom it pleases me to say it." His eyes sparkled with anticipation, and his left hand fell to the hilt of a finely-wrought steel sword at his belt. "If you take umbrage at it, it would be my pleasure to educate you on the matter." Behind him, another form rose from the table. "Avar," he said chidingly as he strode into the light. "Did not the blessed Martyr say that peace was greater than the sword? It becomes one of your stature to mark his words closely, and none moreso than these." The speaker was perhaps forty years of age, his thinning hair just starting to show gray, and his full beard was speckled with flecks of it. He wore formal white robes over a scaled tabard, with a stylized flame on the left breast. "Furthermore," he continued, "I have only just recovered from healing the hurts you took from the last tavern brawl you started, and I have no desire to watch you beaten into a senseless pulp again because your bravado was far larger than your common sense." Turning to the dwarf, he smiled in a conciliatory fashion. "Pardon my young charge here. Perhaps age will bring him wisdom." Avar flushed red, and made as if to retort angrily. "Julian!" he began, but was cut off by the older man's words. "Now, Avar, I have completed my inquiries, and the Martyr has shown me that the crown of your fathers is not to be found in this forgotten realm. I should say that we ought to consult with the sages at Cherisse. And then we can return to Menkor for you to be crowned." And like that, the young man's anger was gone, replaced by excitement, and he followed the priest out of the tavern eagerly." I thought I'd drop in to say hi. Unfortunately, I don't have time to actually participate in this RP, but it looks really fun! I'll be following it with great interest.

26, will be 27 in October

You have a good point... Sorry for getting off-track. Maybe I should make an "Ask a scientist anything" thread - although I haven't even graduated with my degree yet... May can't come too soon!

The vast majority of Earth's history has been free of year-round ice at the poles. We have fossil evidence of plants and dinosaurs in Australia dating to the early Cretaceous period - between 100-150 million years ago. At that time, Australia was still connected to Antarctica, and both were within the modern-day Antarctic circle. But it was warm enough there for plants to thrive, apparently. So, the alternative to an ice age is not to have ice sheets at either pole. And that's the norm, for geologic history. The ice age we're currently in started about 2 and a half million years ago (give or take a couple hundred thousand), and has been marked by periods of heavy glaciation - which is what most folks think about when they think of an Ice Age - ice sheets stretching across Europe and North America, huge wooly animals, etc. In between these periods have been interglacials, when the ice hasn't stretched as far. That's what we're in right now, and have been for the past 10,000 years or so.

For being very interested in my worldbuilding thread.

Climate change is an interesting subject. Almost nobody credible disputes that it's happening. A few people - mostly outside the actual climate science community - dispute whether or not humans influence it. The big debate is "how much" and "what are the results going to be?" That last bit is the tricky part, because we don't have another planet to run experiments on. All we can do is build computer models, and there's way too much complexity in the weather systems to be sure our models are getting things exactly right. But we can make good, reasonable predictions. And sometimes even those get proven wrong because of mechanisms that we didn't fully understand yet. So the story of climate research is building a computer model, comparing ti to real-world data for a few years, noticing a discrepancy, crunching the math until we figure out where it is, putting into the model, running it again, and so on. Our models are getting much more accurate than they were. And the measurements of the atmosphere are clear - CO2 levels are increasing. Temperature is increasing. We have reasonable (but not perfect) models that indicate a correlation. We have firm science that gives us a mechanism for why increased CO2 could cause increased temperature. So it's certain that the temperature is increasing. It's almost certain (and extremely likely) that human activity is contributing to that increase, probably significantly. The end results of the temperature increase are far less certain, but we have computer models that we are constantly updating, devoted to the task of answering that question.

As a Mormon, I don't. Of course, there are Mormons who do, but as a physicist, I've worked with the data firsthand, and I find it quite convincing.

Yours sounds awesome too, and I've only heard its name! But I'm glad that you like my setting so far.

Thanks! It's good to know my voice is appreciated around here.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. Disclaimer: Thousand Realms, Inc. cannot be held liable for any damage to brains that may occur as the result of reading the information contained in this thread. Costs for brain repair are the sole responsibility of the consumer Well, in the beginning, the All-Father Eil and his soul-sealed Ashyr... jk Edassa (one of the settings in this multiverse) started when I was in junior high school (about 12 years ago now, probably. Maybe 13. Give or take a little bit). It started with a couple of characters - I had always loved telling stories, and I had always loved books, especially Lord of the Rings, Narnia, etc. This was the time when I really started to get into modern epic fantasy. I read the Wheel of Time and was hooked (which is weird, because I started on book 8, because that's all they had at my junior high library - there's no way I should have gotten hooked from there, but I was). I read Dragonlance, Earthsea, Riddle-Master of Hed, and a number of other classics. I'm pretty sure I worked my way through most of the fantasy section in my public library. And I decided that I wanted to join authors like that. I don't remember whether or not I started the characters before I got into these fantasy series, but they were definitely outgrowths of the same impulse. Anyways, these characters turned out to have a story. So I started writing it. I got 3 or 4 chapters into the book by the time I was in 10th grade - I actually turned in a copy for a creative writing class. That was the year I started drawing maps for the world these characters lived in, and plotting out a history for it. The book flopped. It wasn't bad - especially not for a 14-year old - but it's not great. Maybe I'll come back to those few chapters, but so much has changed since then I'd practically need to start over. The maps were what really started it for me. I began to put together a world - a real one, not just a backdrop for a story, but a world that lived and grew and existed after a story ended. Several years later, in my first year of college, I got sidetracked by some cool ideas for a science fiction setting, because I was beginning to develop my love for physics. I wanted realistic science fiction - interstellar battles that could happen in the real world, FTL that wasn't ruled out by real science. Then I realized that the science fiction series could easily be the future of my fantasy one, and I started thinking about that. I always wanted the link to be tenuous - no recognizable continuity, I thought it would be distracting. Just enough to have cool easter eggs for readers without needing them to read a whole different series of an entirely different genre if they didn't want to. Then I served a mission for the LDS Church, and a lot of those ideas started to crystallize together. I told my stories to some of my companions, and they wanted more. So I started thinking and planning and plotting. I got home, and graduated from my community college, got married, and moved to attend University. (This was the general time period when I found Brandon...) For a while, my stories stayed kind of in the background, because I was so focused on school. I spent my creative time working out exact science for my science fiction series - energy yields of mass driver rounds, released energy of antimatter or fusion explosives, etc. My senior research project is on wormholes - chosen because I wanted to understand how they worked well enough to put them in a story correctly. I added a Religious Studies degree along the way, and that changed everything. Learning about real-world religions sparked my interest in writing about societies and people again, not just technology. So I started to develop the cultures that inhabited my worlds, and it quickly became important to know their religions. But I couldn't really write their religions unless I knew what the truth about the cosmology was. What parts of their religions were true, and what parts were cultural tradition that didn't match reality? That was when this project started. This was about the time I started the Edassan Roleplay, too, which was really helpful in a lot of ways. The questions people asked made me think about my settings in ways I hadn't done and from angles I hadn't considered. I recommend it. The ideas for the particular cosmology started with Mormon theology fused, oddly enough, with the cosmology of Dungeons and Dragons. Ish. At least, the idea of the planes came from there. I knew I wanted a number of planes of existence, and I knew I wanted to start with Mormon theology. I incorporated into that a lot of cool tidbits I'd learned over the years about ancient Hebrew and Canaanite religions, especially the concept of the divine council, and tried to think of how the speculative Mormon theologians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (the Pratts, Brigham Young, B.H. Roberts, etc) might have incorporated these into their worldviews. I took what came out of that process and altered it further, making changes to it to allow for more drama. I knew I wanted pantheons of gods for my setting, and Mormon theology doesn't flow naturally in that direction, so I made alterations enough to make pantheons make sense in the setting, without feeling forced and awkward. I knew I wanted the High God of my setting to be absent, almost in the sense of Deism, and Mormon theology balked at that, so I changed things in my setting enough to make that make sense. I wanted credible threats to various planes of existence, and Mormon theology really didn't like that one, so I think I broke a few points there. But I got it working, I think. I had to think through issues of gender identity, and how that interacted with mortality - I wanted a yin-yang sort of thing going on at a cosmic level, perfect binary, but I didn't want to write out whole classes of people who don't have that experiences in their lives - that is, I didn't want them to feel invisible, even with a cosmic binary. So I had to figure out how that worked in the setting. And I had to figure out how the magic worked. From the RP I'd done, I'd gotten a couple of good starting ideas. Some came from D&D, because I wanted to be able to use this as a campaign setting without drastically changing the rules there. I altered it to make sense for the setting, and because I wanted magic to follow the laws of physics. Mostly, that is. When I got the idea about magic users being able to grab the energy from chemical bonds, I realized that I could do the same thing on a larger scale. Make all of the power of the gods based on bonds between people. And things just started falling into place. Plot points I knew I needed but didn't know how to explain started to fall together naturally. New interactions arose that offered newer and more exciting ways of doing things, and offered solutions to problems I didn't know I had. The rest is (almost) history. Sorry for rambling on and on and on about this. Hope you find it useful.

It's my spring break! A whole week off from classes. If only I didn't have so much homework

Well, I like you, without qualifications or restrictions. You seem like the kind of person I'd enjoy hanging out with IRL if you lived nearby. Also, I know how that feels. I have the same sort of anxiety - not as severe, it sounds like - bUT I feel like that often. (Especially on the Shard, for some reason)

Thank you I think I'll try to get another section added to it this week.

Here you go! It's not finished (sorry Kobold!) but I like it so far. Good Svalding mythos there.

I could certainly have some of the oldest stories talk about him as a giant. (Most likely, the giant stories were older, but he got attached to them because he was named Bran, just like the king)

Turned out 40 hours a week of work and full-time school was too much for me to handle. But graduation in May changes the equation quite a bit. If you guys are really interested in starting the same RP up (or at least using the same characters) - I'm OK with that. By the way, BreathTaker, I decided that Bran the Blessed became a legendary figure later on in Edassan history. I ought to post a link to a short story I started writing for Kobold called Surtinaur. Bran shows up in the footnotes (written by some academic archaeologist guy who doesn't really know what he's talking about - he thinks magic is a myth). I thought you'd like that.

Well, I graduate in May, so we'll see what we can do at that time. I'm probably not going to restart this one (although if everyone wants to, I'm willing), but I'd certainly be interested in opening up another one then. I'd even have a great deal more preparation under my belt for things like spell lists (hopefully). In the meantime, I'd love help with my worldbuilding project thread! Right now I'm taking votes as to whether to worldbuild more for Edassa or for the City of Mortals next (nobody's voted so far... but if you do it now, you might be able to get to pick yourself! And I do take requests for worldbuilding areas and cultures )

We'll miss you! Don't be away too long!

And the Cosmological History is complete! Some of you might remember my earlier creation myth - this builds upon it and expands it, bringing the history down all the way to the present day. All of the settings I've created in the Thousand Realms so far happen during the Age of Mortals. As always, feedback is much appreciated. This completes phase 1 of the worldbuilding process. The background cosmological structure and history is now complete, pending any questions, of course. (Which I would love to answer, if any of you intrepid readers have any.) The next phase remains slightly unclear. I'm either going to port over the extant info on Edassa - which would be a lot of work, but good to have it all in a single place and organized - and then work on expanding it (there are still a large number of cultures not explored yet). The other option (and more appealing to me right now, because that's what I've been worldbuilding on the most, recently) is to explore the City of Mortals setting. Which I think is rather cool. So, to the one or two folks who are still following this, which one are you more interested in seeing next?

I'll spectate this one out too.

I hid my post, so it wasn't sitting in the middle of your reserved sections. Sorry about that. I'll repeat what I said here, though. I like the setting. Just curious - why are there only 7 Veiled Ones? Are they remnants of some long-forgotten race from another universe, or are they a natural product of the pre-universe?